I want to write something about being creative. About how life affirming it is to have a creative practice. How exciting it is to venture out in to the unknown and collect dust and gold. How sometimes there is just dust and dust and dust and you get close to losing hope and then you wake up one morning and look at that dust and realise this is like no other thing you have seen before, and it was born through you. You gave birth to this thing and you don’t know for sure if you think its good or bad but there it is and it’s absolutely something. And then you can send it out in to the world, or you can decide to keep it in a drawer for a while and send it out later, or you can keep it in the drawer and forget about it, or if you decide that maybe it was just ordinary dust after all you can throw it away.
I have read Nick Caves and Sean O’hagan’s book Faith hope and carnage. I read it as I was woking on my new books most intensely and it followed me as a kind of guide. It reassured me.